In what could be a major setback to the growing white supremacist movement, a jury Monday awarded $12.5 million to the family of a black man beaten to death by skinheads allegedly incited by Tom Metzger and his organization, the White Aryan Resistance. The award was the maximum sought in the lawsuit brought by a team led by civil rights attorney Morris Dees. Tom Metzger was ordered to pay $5 million. His son John was ordered to pay $1 million.

A neo-Nazi acknowledged Friday that attacks on Oregon minorities increased with the arrival of racist skinheads tied to a group that allegedly incited the murder of a black man. In testifying in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against white supremacist Tom Metzger, neo-Nazi Rickey Cooper said he wrote of the increased attacks in the October, 1988, issue of his Socialist Vanguard Report.

Allen David Mazzella, a California white supremacist, told a jury how he passed on the violent racist teachings of Tom Metzger to three Portland, Ore., skinheads hours before they beat and killed Mulugeta Seraw, a 27-year-old Ethiopian student. Mazzella, 21, testified on behalf of the victim's family, who are suing Metzger, 52, of Fallbrook, Calif.

Tom Metzger's war has come. But unlike the street skirmishes he has preached for years as part of his Southern California-based White Aryan Resistance (WAR), the battlefield is on the fifth floor of the Multnomah County Courthouse here. Trial opened Monday in a lawsuit by a group of Deep South civil rights attorneys who contend that Metzger and his son John should be held accountable for the beating death two years ago of a black man by a gang of young, white radical "skinheads."

The Oregon Board of Parole Wednesday ordered a member of the Watts-based Ecclesia Athletic Assn. to serve 10 years in prison for the beating death of an 8-year-old girl. The board set the term for Constance Jackson, one of four Ecclesia members convicted of manslaughter in the October, 1988, death of Dayna Broussard. She was the daughter of Eldridge Broussard Jr.

Tom Metzger of Fallbrook, head of the White Aryan Resistance, was sued Friday in Portland, Ore., federal court by the uncle of an Ethiopian who was beaten to death last year by skinheads, young Neo-Nazis who favor shaved heads, steel-toed boots and military-style clothing.

Constance Jackson's face does not brighten often these days. But her eyes light up when she talks about how she met Eldridge Broussard Jr., the man who changed her life. "Anthony was about to be born," she says, referring to her son, now 13. "I heard a tape from a next-door neighbor of El and he was preaching on how you really don't have to die. I was getting ready to go into the hospital to have some extensive surgery. I didn't feel I was gonna make it, and I heard that tape.

An Oregon Juvenile Court judge has rejected a plan submitted by the Ecclesia Athletic Assn. for the return of 53 children taken into protective custody by the state after a child's beating death. The children were removed from a farmhouse near Sandy owned by the Los Angeles-based group after Dayna Broussard, the 8-year-old daughter of group founder Eldridge Broussard Jr., was beaten to death during a discipline session last October.

A member of a skinhead group Monday was sentenced to life in prison, with no parole for at least 20 years, for beating a man to death because he was black. Kenneth M. Mieske, 23, of Portland, was ordered to serve at least 20 years before he will be eligible for parole. (The state parole board could release him earlier only by a unanimous vote.) Mieske pleaded guilty to felony murder in the Nov. 13 death of Mulugeta Seraw, 27, an Ethiopian national who was attacked with a baseball bat outside his apartment here.

An Oregon judge has rejected a petition filed by four Ecclesia Athletic Assn. members to halt their trial for the beating death of the group founder's daughter. Clackamas County Circuit Judge John Lowe ruled that the defendants have no legal standing to have the trial transferred to federal court after they claimed the state of Oregon prohibited them from free exercise of their religion. The defendants also asked that the trial be halted so their organization could hear the case against them.